The Patron of Tbilisi

St. Abo is venerated as the patron saint of Tbilisi, and his cult is fixed at the site of his martyrdom on the bank of the Kura, beneath the cliff of Metekhi and near the sulphur baths of Abanotubani in the old city. A church dedicated to him stands there, and his feast is kept on 8 January, two days after the martyrdom of 6 January.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

Patron of the Capital

The most remarkable fact of Abo’s veneration is its object: the Arab convert executed under the Arab emirate became the patron saint of Tbilisi, the very city whose law condemned him (on the patronage, the standard reference literature and the OCA notice, oca.org; and see An Arab Saint of Georgia). The authorities had burned his body and scattered his ashes precisely to prevent the Christians from raising a cult (see The Witness of 6 January 786); the outcome was the opposite of their intention. Not only did a cult arise, but it took Abo as the heavenly protector of the whole city — an honor that has endured for more than twelve centuries and that makes Abo one of the defining sacred figures of the Georgian capital.

That a martyr with no surviving relics, of foreign origin, should become the patron of the city is a mark of how deeply his witness impressed the Christian community of eighth-century Tbilisi and how faithfully the memory was carried — anchored, from the first, in the near-contemporary Life of Sabanisdze that gave the city a permanent account of its martyr (see A Masterpiece of Georgian Literature).

The Site: Metekhi and the Kura

Abo’s veneration is intensely local — fixed, from the beginning, at the place of his death. He was burned outside the city on the bank of the Kura (Mtkvari), and his ashes were cast into the river, at the spot beneath the rocky left-bank cliff on which the church of Metekhi would later stand (see The Witness of 6 January 786; OCA notice, oca.org, on the chapel later built on the Mtkvari’s left bank). This is the heart of old Tbilisi: the Metekhi cliff overlooking the river, and, just below and around it, the historic Abanotubani — the district of the sulphur bath-houses whose warm springs give Tbilisi (from Georgian tbili, “warm”) its very name. Abo’s cult is woven into this oldest and most characteristic quarter of the city, so that to venerate him is, in a sense, to venerate at the origin-point of Tbilisi itself.

The tradition of the site is thus a tradition of a place rather than of a portable shrine. Where a saint whose relics survive may be venerated wherever those relics travel, Abo is venerated here — at the river, beneath Metekhi, in the old city where he died. The geography of the martyrdom became the geography of the cult (see The Cult and the Relics).

The Church of St. Abo

A church dedicated to St. Abo stands in this quarter, near the site of his martyrdom below the Metekhi cliff, and serves as the principal shrine of his veneration in Tbilisi (on the Church of St. Abo Tbileli in the old city, the standard local and reference literature). [Disputed: the precise architectural history and dating of the church buildings associated with Abo’s site have varied over the centuries — the earliest chapel, later churches, and the present structure belong to different periods, and the details of their succession are matters for architectural history rather than for the hagiographic sources; the collection reports the continuity of a dedicated place of veneration at the site without asserting a specific building history the primary sources do not supply.] What is constant across the centuries is the dedication of a sacred place to Abo at or near the spot where he died, keeping the memory of the martyr fixed to the ground of his witness.

The Feast

St. Abo is commemorated on 8 January (Old Style; corresponding to 21 January on the Gregorian calendar) — two days after the martyrdom itself on 6 January 786 (the feast of 8 January is given in the Georgian and wider Orthodox calendars and in the reference literature; OCA notice, oca.org, gives the commemoration on 8 January). The proximity of the feast to the martyrdom-date of 6 January, the feast of Theophany, situates Abo’s commemoration within the radiance of the Nativity–Theophany season: the martyr who died on the day of the Lord’s Baptism is remembered in the days that follow it. The hymnography of the feast develops the themes proper to Abo — the Arab who became a Christian, the perfumer who became himself a sweet fragrance offered to God, the martyr glorified by the light over the river where they thought to erase him (on the hymnographic themes, the liturgical tradition of the feast).

The feast is the living heart of Abo’s veneration. Where there are no relics to process and no tomb to visit — the body having been destroyed by design — it is above all in the annual liturgical commemoration, at the church of his name and throughout the Georgian Church, that Abo continues to be honored and invoked as the patron of Tbilisi (see The Cult and the Relics and Abo in Georgian Memory).

A Patron Without a Tomb

Abo’s patronage of Tbilisi has a distinctive shape precisely because of how he died. Most patron saints of cities are venerated at a tomb or a reliquary; Abo has neither, by the deliberate act of those who killed him. His patronage rests instead on three things: the place of his martyrdom, marked and made holy; the annual feast that keeps his memory; and the text of Sabanisdze that preserves his story. This is a cult built not on relics but on memory, geography, and the written word — and it has proved, over twelve centuries, entirely durable. The attempt to leave Abo nothing left him a city (see The Cult and the Relics).

See Also

References

  • Ioane Sabanisdze. The Martyrdom of Abo, c. 786–790. Trans. David Marshall Lang, in Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints, 2nd ed., pp. 115–133. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1976.
  • Lang, David Marshall. Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints. Introduction to the Passion of Abo.
  • “Martyr Abo the Perfumer of Tbilisi, Georgia.” Orthodox Church in America, oca.org. (The feast of 8 January; the chapel on the left bank of the Mtkvari; the patronage of Tbilisi.)